Children enjoy various drawing and coloring activities using a variety of mediums. Useful in such activities are markers containing inks, crayons, pencils of various colors, and various paints including water colors, oil paints, acrylic paints, and pan paints. However, children would often like to change the color of a mark after they have made the mark. One instance would be the desire to add a yellow sun over a previously painted blue sky.
Coloring compositions generally are mixtures of a coloring matter dispersed or dissolved in a carrier. When formulated as pan paints, coloring compositions include a colorant dispersed or dissolved in a water-soluble solid carrier. The colorant, if readily dissolving in a fluid carrier, is termed a dye. An insoluble coloring material is termed a pigment. Pigments are finely ground solid materials and the nature and amount of pigment contained in an ink determines its color.
Pan paints possess a number of advantages over other coloring compositions such as conventional paints, marker inks, and so forth. For example, pan paints have an extraordinarily long shelf life. Because pan paints exist in a solid form, they will not dry out to the point of becoming unusable if exposed to the atmosphere. Moreover, whereas liquid paints may be spilled, pan paints become liquid only in small quantities, and thus are not easily spilled, even by children. In addition, pan paints may be formulated as washable compositions. These features make pan paints especially suitable for use by children.
Changing the color of a mark is not readily done with the typical children's coloring instruments such as those described, nor with typical pan paints. In the past, children changed the marks by placing the mark of one color over the mark of another color. When performing this using traditional pan paints, the marks produced are often not the desired colors, and the tips of the brushes get soiled with the other paints. Further, the colors of traditional children's paints tend to bleed together resulting in undesirable color smears. Therefore, there has been a long felt need for coloring compositions, including pan paints, containing such compositions, which produce marks of a first color that can be readily changed into a wide variety of second colors. Advantageously, a coloring composition should be useful in a coloring system employing both markers and pan paints, to further enhance the play value of the coloring composition for a child. Thus, for example, the user should be able to make a first mark on a substrate using a pan paint, then make a second mark over the first mark using a marker.
In one available marker application, a child is able to change a specific initial mark laid down to a second specific color by applying a reducing agent to the first mark yielding a change in color. The marker inks used in these markers are typically prepared by blending a reducing agent (sometimes termed a bleaching agent) or pH sensitive dye with a dye that is stable in reducing agent or high pH. For example, German Patent Specification No. 2724820, (hereinafter "the German Patent"), concerns the combining of a chemically stable dye and a chemically unstable dye in an ink formulation. Once a mark using this combination of stable and unstable dyes is laid down, the mark may be overwritten with a clear reducing agent solution, eliminating the color contribution of the unstable dye. The resulting mark of the stable dye, with its characteristic color, remains.
There are several drawbacks to such a marking system. First, there are strict limitations on the number of color changes which may be produced. Specifically, in formulations made according to the German Patent, the particular ink composition may only be changed from a first color to a fixed second color. For example, a green mark may only be changed to a violet color as the inks are described in the practice of the German Patent. In addition, since one of the required pair of markers contains only the reducing agent, that reducing agent marker cannot render a visible mark and may only be used in combination with the base color marker. Once the base color marker is used up, the reducing agent marker is of no use. Or, once the reducing agent marker is used up, the base color marker may only be used for the color which it initially marks with. A further disadvantage of the marking process of the German Patent is that the nib of the reducing agent marker tends to get soiled by picking up the colors of the base coloring composition, thus tainting the color of subsequent marks. Further, the compositions disclosed by the German Patent do not possess the advantages inherent in pan paints.
Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide a coloring composition system which is capable of enhanced multiple color changing abilities.
An additional object of the present invention is to produce a pan paint coloring composition system which includes at least two different pan paint coloring compositions each of which may be used independently or which may be used in combination to provide color changing ability.
An additional object of the present invention is to provide a color-changing coloring system that employs both pan paints and markers.
These and other objects will become apparent to those skilled in the art to which the invention pertains.